The Nova launch and a (small) pivot

Aaron

Hello, Colleen. Hello, Aaron. How's it going over there today?

Colleen

It is going great. We had unprecedented rain in San Diego this weekend. So all the streets were flooded, and then yesterday, which is a workday, we lost power. It's a whole thing.

Aaron

I know. I'm trying not to judge y'all too harshly because I've seen that it's been raining, and everyone is freaking out. So I I I don't fully get the whole context, but I'm sorry to hear that it's been raining.

Colleen

Yes. It is pretty funny. I have a family member visiting from the East Coast, and she's very confused why the whole city shuts down when it rains. That's how we do it here in Southern California.

Aaron

Well, that's what that's what Dallas does when we get, like, a half inch of snow. Everybody's like, well, school's off for the next 3 days. So, yeah, I get it. Well, last week we talked about Nova. We did.

And that the goal was to launch Nova, and we did it. Yay. Nova Nova is launched. Amazing. So we have a new homepage that's strictly focused on Nova at hammerstone.dev.

We have a new Nova package that supports Laravel Nova 34, the 2 major versions. I think most people are migrating to 4, but I know a lot of people are still on 3. And, yeah, it's out there and, like, available for sale, and we've made a few sales.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

So, mission accomplished. Not a smashing success, which you and I have talked about, in terms of money, but a smashing success in terms of getting it done and getting it published and going the last, you know, 5%, which takes all of the time that the first 95 did. So, I feel super great about that. Yeah. I guess thoughts on any of the Nova stuff?

Colleen

Well, I thought it was awesome. When we were on that sales call yesterday, And the person who purchased it, I believe his exact words were, well, I purchased it. Then I saw you didn't support Nova V4. Wasn't it great to be, like, oh, but now we do. Like, let us help you get it installed.

Like, those are such Yeah. Winning moments.

Aaron

That felt really good.

Colleen

Yeah. And the demos, tell me about those demos you put together.

Aaron

Right? So we have 2 demos atnova 3 dot hammerstone.devandnova4.hammerstone.dev. So they're both live public demos running Nova and Refine. So I needed basically, I needed playgrounds as I was building out the package. I needed places to test out, you know, that everything was working.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

Because we don't have any automated tests for the Nova integration yet. Obviously, refine is pretty heavily tested, but, like, for the all the Nova integration, I don't have any automated tests for that yet. And so I had these 2 fresh installs of Nova 3 and Nova 4, and I thought I could just, like, I could just put these on Laravel Vapor pretty quickly and for almost free because we already have an account, and then we would finally have a public demo Yeah. Of Refine.

Colleen

Love that.

Aaron

And it's kind of irrelevant that it's in Nova. I mean, you get the idea. It's a it's a big admin panel with a UI, and you can filter stuff down. And so, yeah, I did it, and I was surprised at how easy it was once I was done and thrilled to be able to say, like, go try it. We have we have public demos.

Just go try it out yourself. And I think that was really valuable. And I think part of that is, like, you know, we've we've been wanting to have a public demo for a long time. Right? And I was working on it for a while, and then it just stopped, and I got super discouraged about it because it was like, oh, this, you know, front end stuff isn't quite there yet.

And then as I was working through getting Nova launched, I, like, ended up fixing a bunch of that front end stuff that I wasn't pleased with. And so then once I feel like once the blocker was done, getting the demos up really did take a few minutes. That was it. Yeah. And so I kind of feel like I kind of feel like the barriers have been removed, and now things are starting to flow.

So that part of the launch feels really, really good, because now I'm confident with the front end packages, at least on the Vue side, which is all I really care about. Confident with the front end packages, able to make changes and publish them and consume them in other libraries, and so all of that feels really good.

Colleen

Yeah. That's huge.

Aaron

Yeah. So, yeah, we had that sales call. The guy that bought the Nova 1 bought it at 9.99, just right before we dropped the price. And he was like, Yeah, I saw it at 9.99, and that made sense, and so I bought it. Well, we're gonna refund we're gonna refund you, you know, $750, but that's great to hear.

And then someone else bought it for 2.49, and that's good. Got some emails that were like, yeah. This is really great. Got some emails that were like, this is insanely expensive. I can't believe you're executing a crap a a cash grab on the Laravel ecosystem.

And I was like, alright, man. That's great. So I'm sure that there will be plenty more of those to come. But yeah. Anything else about Nova before we talk about our pivot, not pivot?

Colleen

Well, one of the other fun things about launching Nova is we sent the email to our whole list, and we actually got, a few people that are rails people that we're gonna have calls with. So I thought that was really great. Like, just to be, you know, we don't email our list

Aaron

list a lot, which I like because

Colleen

I hate getting emails. But, it's nice. You know, I think it was really good. Like, we had the Nova, and then we had other people be like, oh, what about rails? What's happening with that pricing?

And then, we're like, hey, let's get on a call. And so that worked out. So I'm happy, you know, to continue to do these interviews especially with what you're about to share in terms of positioning.

Aaron

Well, I've been talking. Why don't you share in terms of positioning?

Colleen

Okay. So well, I guess we did talk about it a little bit last week, did we?

Aaron

A little bit, I think.

Colleen

So this idea of we have built this component that can do all the things. But because it can do everything, it's very hard to explain it, to position it, to get people to understand the power. And we've we've even talked about how this is almost like a an engine, you know, like an entire layer that sits between your ORM and your UI. It's like this whole incredibly powerful layer, but people just really having a hard time communicating that. So we're gonna take that idea of this query builder, interactive query builder, visual interactive query builder, and spin up business intelligence, spin up reports for your customers.

Aaron

Yeah. So it doesn't feel like a super pivot to me. It feels like a an a niching down, like a picking one use case and building out that use case fully. Right? So I think something that we have been telling people is if you buy refine, you can make really powerful reports in your application.

And instead of just telling people that, we're just gonna do it. Like, we're just gonna make a reporting package, and so your customers can come in and say, like, you know, show me the people that have bought this thing in the past 5 days, and then get the full on alright. Download a CSV, email it to me once a week, like, show me these columns, but not these columns, and, basically, just make the whole reporting view, where, historically, we've only we've stopped at basically, like, the filtering view. And so it just feels like fleshing out of one use case instead of letting people decide what they're gonna do with it.

Colleen

I think it I think it's more power I mean, not more powerful than that what it can do. I think the fleshing out of of what we have already built is going to have a greater impact than you think. Because I don't know if it's Laravel or it's a difference in us, but your people your people. It seems like you and the people you work with in the Larabell community are very happy to or more happy to add a lot of that business logic around the filters. Whereas and it might just be because the rails system, the rails ecosystem's a little more mature, But I feel like the rails companies, their thought is and this is, again, this is just based on a couple customer interviews.

So it's really not data. It's more of a gut feeling. They're like, you want me to pay $7,000 for this thing? It needs to do all the things. I don't wanna buy the thing and then have to spend, you know, 8 hours building out saved filters or building out background jobs to send emails.

Like, I want the thing to be done. And I think it's so I really think it's I feel really good about it. Like, this is kind of

Aaron

Yeah. I do too.

Colleen

Yeah. It's kind of what I think I have secretly wanted to do from the beginning. I feel really good about it. And I think I'll

Aaron

I feel

go ahead.

Colleen

I just think a lot of the issues too with integrating you take away a lot of the pain of integrating in a different application when you just provide the route and the whole thing.

Aaron

Mhmm. Yeah. I think, one thing I'm really excited about is people understand this immediately. So it's not like, well, we are we're a query builder, and you could use it to filter down anything. And they're like, I don't I don't know what that means, man.

People understand what reports are. Yeah. People want reports. People understand reports. People are looking and searching for reporting.

That is awesome. We even named the Nova one like or the tagline is like drop in reporting. It's like, yeah, it's mostly just filtering at this point, honestly, but Nova brings a lot of the extra views. We're going to call it reporting while we build out, you know, the rest of the reporting package. So that that's exciting.

People already understand it. And the other exciting thing that you said is we get to own the whole application. Like, we will drop into Laravel or Rails your application, but then once you hit our endpoint, we'll take all of the configuration that you've given us, and we will build out the interface ourselves. There's no more, like, can you theme the thing to look like my, you know, my UI? It's like, no.

This is your reporting interface. This is what reporting is gonna look like here. And that means we don't have to do stimulus. We don't have to do React. We can just build one interface and share it between the 2 of us, and we get to own the whole thing.

It just makes me it's just such a relief.

Colleen

I think it's gonna be great. I'm super pumped for that. That's going to be from a, like, happiness developer what do they call it? Founder product fit?

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

It's gonna be good for us, I think, especially considering the struggles we have had so far.

Aaron

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I already feel better about it. So, I've been like nights and early mornings, been working on, like, a a not a mock up, it actually works, but not a fully fleshed, like, reporting thing. And I already feel like, okay, this makes this makes for a much easier sale. I still think Refine is the powerful the more powerful, better product, but like I told you at some point, I don't care.

Like, if other people don't think that, I don't care. I I would rather sell them what they want than try to convince them that they need what I'm selling, so I just don't care.

Colleen

Yeah. That's that's smart.

Aaron

Yeah. Thanks. So, yeah, that that's what I'm up to. I don't really have a timeline on that. You know, next week, I'm in, Lisbon for Laracon EU, which will be a lot of fun.

But yeah, I'll continue to work on that in whatever spare time I have. Yeah. So that's it. What's going on on your side?

Colleen

Well, I feel like I've been running a marathon Mhmm. Figuratively speaking, but it also feels amazing. I mean, I know we talked about this I know we talked about this last week, but it was just these past 2 weeks. Knock on wood. You know, part of being a founder is there's highs and lows.

And I am definitely in a high point right now. It just feels great.

Aaron

Feels great.

Colleen

Feels great. Like, I feel like we're making progress. I have adjusted some, you know, some of the things with the developers that are working for me to kind of better set expectations. And we've been pairing a lot more, and we're pushing code a lot more aggressively. It feels great.

Like, it feels like there were a couple really painful parts with our and our front end is still like I I think I did say last week that we're working on a v 2, which is almost a complete it's a completely separate front end. But we're in in parallel with that. We are working on improving, the front end that we have now. So we have 2 tracks right now. We have what we have now, which is being used by our, you know, enterprise client, which has, I don't know, millions of users or something.

And in parallel, we're working on on v 2. But, like, just today, we just we just had this super win. Like, we we have this front end situation because of this weird state management we're doing, where we're kind of keeping state on the front end and the back end. We were doing these round trips to the server every time there was an on blur on a text input. Dee.

Oh, yeah. E is right. Like there were race conditions. Yikes. You would type and it would like not it was it was not ideal.

Like, it kind of mostly works, but it was just one of those

Aaron

That's what I say when things are terrible. It's not ideal.

Colleen

I know. I picked that up from you. It's funny. I picked up a few phrases from you. Not ideal and precious, which I've never used that word before.

I met you. Anyway,

Aaron

yeah. In context of caring too much.

Colleen

Caring too much. I've never heard it like

Aaron

being too delicate about a certain thing.

Colleen

I'm precious about my code.

Aaron

Too precious about that.

Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen

I'm precious about my code. I was like, what does that mean? That's funny. So, for example, like, I'm feeling good today. You know, my one of my guys and I, we were preparing for, I don't know, 2, 3 hours, and, we fixed it.

And it's a small thing, and there's still a lot of weird state management and a lot of, like, other stuff we can tackle in the existing version, but it felt really good. Like, those little wins, like Yeah.

Aaron

Sounds good.

Colleen

Knocking them out as we can, while we have you know, I have, the other person who is working for us working on a v two. So it's kinda neat how we've been able to work in parallel.

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

Hopefully, we're keeping the client happy. I'm going to, you know, email all of our existing

Aaron

customers who are waiting on Refine this week to give them an update. Yeah. Hopefully, we're keeping the client happy. I'm going to,

Colleen

you know, email all of our existing customers who are waiting on Refine this week to give them an update. Yeah. No. You know, I'm trying to make decisions quickly and, like, just do stuff.

Aaron

Just do stuff. Just freaking do stuff.

Colleen

I mean, it's like this is what I told myself. I said this to someone yesterday. I was like, if one developer at the FAA can bring down the entire air travel in the United States of America, like, you don't need to worry. You can push that code. Yeah.

That'd be fine.

Aaron

Yeah. I like that.

Colleen

Because I've I've found that I'm, you know, I'm a little bit of a perfectionist sometimes when I review PRs or when I, you know, I don't want to break anything ever. Right? And that's just

Aaron

Same. Same.

Colleen

I think that slowed me down a little bit. And so, I kinda think this new attitude towards, like, we're just gonna do stuff. We're gonna make decisions. If we're wrong, we can fix it.

Aaron

I like that. I agree. New year, new energy. We're both hustle bros now. But, hey, we're gonna we're gonna make stuff happen.

Colleen

Oh my gosh. Can I tell you a funny hustle bro story? I thought of you.

Aaron

Please.

Colleen

So I go to the gym, which is 8 minutes from my house. On the way to the gym, I listen to Champion by Fall Out Boy. On the way back from the gym oh, it's not over. I'm not done. Like, I do this every day, Aaron.

Aaron

Fall Out Boy, Colleen?

Colleen

Is it Fall Out Boy? Champion.

Aaron

Yeah. It is.

Colleen

And on the way back from the gym, I listened to Champion by Carrie Underwood. That's all I listen to, back and forth on the way.

Aaron

Hey. Wow. Yeah. That's some, that's some real mental programming and 2 songs I don't know that I've ever listened to.

Colleen

Well, I listen to them.

Aaron

I'll see if there are any more songs named champion that I can find for you.

Colleen

So I'm all in right now. Feeling great. Just leaning into that that excitement, which, you know, as as we know, comes and goes with

Aaron

It comes and goes while it's here.

We

gotta milk it for all its worth.

Colleen

That's right. Enjoy it while you have it.

Aaron

So you're gonna email the current customers. Why not email the whole list that said they were rails people? Is that crazy?

Colleen

So my thought was, my my here is my plan. My plan is, I first now that we've made some of these stimulus changes that we literally made today Mhmm. Put it in a jump start pro application, like a clean app, a clean rails app.

Aaron

Oh.

Colleen

Write down my steps again. There's still probably 12 or 13 steps, so it's not ideal. But I kinda wanna wrap my head around where we are right now because there's a lot of moving parts here as I've told you about. So in terms of integration, where are we with our existing product?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

So the plan is to figure that out tomorrow. And then once I know that, first would be I I don't really think I have anything to share with the whole list. I think the people who bought it, I want to, you know, tell them, like, V2's coming out this day, this day, this time ish. If you wanna wait, like, you know, kind of context. We talked about it last week.

If you wanna wait, wait. If you can't wait, I have full context now on what you need, and I'll move forward with you. But but I think that should just be for my founding customer group right now. Emailing the whole list, I wanna be you know, software. Like, v 2, I don't really know when it's gonna be done.

Like, the first

Aaron

Sure. Yeah.

Colleen

Guess is at the end of the month, but I don't want to promise that, and I don't want to share the mock ups just in case we end up deviating from them.

Aaron

That makes sense.

Colleen

I feel like in a month or 2, I'll be ready, to email the whole list, but not quite yet.

Aaron

Okay. Just don't be too precious about emailing the whole list.

Colleen

And I think See? Yeah. That was perfect. That was perfect use of it. I think too I mean, I know this is in the future, but really, like, we're we are, we need to find different I think the people who signed up for the list are probably not the same people who are gonna pay $75100 for a product.

Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe not. But I think too, I I we're gonna have to start doing interesting things like cold emailing and and reaching out to people on LinkedIn.

Oh my gosh. LinkedIn. What a dumpster fire. I know. Like, what?

Aaron

I know.

Colleen

It's like, oh, my gosh. It's like a 100 notifications. What is happening? So don't don't reach out to me on LinkedIn because I don't use it. But I will.

Aaron

Yeah. I think you're right. I think we're gonna have to do some some sales navigating at some point.

Colleen

Yeah. I'm super pumped for it. But I think, again, I want us to be in a little bit of a better position than we are now product wise. And, honestly, with your reporting feature, I mean, wouldn't it be great? I just think, like, once we can migrate in in, migrate isn't the right word.

Once we can merge all of this stuff into a single reporting feature, that is gonna be I mean, that's a whole new product. Like, we can position that whole new product.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. It's a whole new product. And I will be curious I'll be curious to see how that goes. Like, if we start demoing this reporting feature and everybody's like, yeah, I wanna buy that, do we just eventually fold refine into it and not sell refine as a standalone thing?

Colleen

Yeah. Probably.

Aaron

Probably. Right?

Mhmm.

Colleen

We'll see how it goes, but but I think that is probably going to be what happens.

Aaron

Yeah. I think probably so. And man, we shoulda, you know, coulda, shoulda. Just being in control of everything, like, in this reporting interface, it just makes it so it just makes everything easier when you don't have to account for what might someone want to do. Right.

You're like, well, they can't do that. Like, maybe we'll you can put a request in and we'll add it as a feature of this reporting tool, but we don't have to support every use case that you could think of because you're not in control of it. So we'll see. I I'm I'm excited for it. I think the possibilities are good, and I like that it's not it's not like we have to go build something entirely new.

It's we have to build the last 20%

Colleen

of the world ordering

Aaron

for you.

Colleen

The rest of it is easy.

Aaron

Yeah. It really is. It's like, which columns do you wanna see?

Colleen

We did the hard stuff already.

Aaron

Exported as CSV. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Yep. I like it.

Colleen

So I just I just think for minimal work, we're gonna completely change the product.

Aaron

Yeah. I think that's right. Okay. Well, this is exciting. I feel good about this.

Colleen

Awesome.

Aaron

So Anything else on your side?

Colleen

No. What, are you speaking next week?

Aaron

I am.

Colleen

Which talk are you giving?

Aaron

I am, redeeming the GitHub Universe talk.

Oh,

good. So I'm gonna drastically boost my numbers from, like, 8 people that have heard it to a few 100. So that that makes me feel better.

Colleen

That's awesome.

Aaron

Yeah. And we're going, we're going as sponsors. So 2 of my coworkers are coming. 2 of my Planet Skilled coworkers are coming. So Holly, whom you met

Colleen

I know. Yeah. I know all your friends.

Aaron

Real sass.

Colleen

We're all basically.

Aaron

So we're going together and then another woman on our team named Taylor. So it'll be fun.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

It's

gonna be so fun. And there are gonna be so many the last overseas conference I went to was a PHP conference, which was fine. But this one is a Laravel conference. And so, like, all of my Internet friends are gonna be there.

Yeah.

It's gonna be a freaking blast. I'm so pumped.

Colleen

That's awesome. That will be fun.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. It'll be great. So I'll be out next week in, in Lisbon.

Colleen

Oh. That'll be awesome. Yep.

Aaron

Alright. Anything else?

Colleen

Nothing else on my side.

Aaron

Alright. Talk to you later. Bye.